Download or read book Games for Criminal Status written by Günther Grewe and published by Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften. This book was released on 1979 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report develops a game model of criminal development. If social life is understood to be a sequence of encounters which can be analyzed as games for social status, then processes leading to criminal status have their parallel in everyday life. The processes leading to criminal status are seen as a sequence of status degradation ceremonies which can be represented as a series of games played by the actor (an offender) with the victim or general public, the police, the prosecutor, and the court. During each of these games, a part of the social reality of criminal behaviour and criminal status is socially simulated. After each game, the actor has a chance to play the subsequent game in the series if he has lost the previous one. A game is lost if the actor's behaviour has been socially constructed as criminal and his status demoted so that in the next game another status degradation is likely. Thus the model that is developed portrays the processes of differential distribution of immunity in society. The model provides a conceptualization of the labelling approach and the principle of marginality (the phenomena of ubiquity, scarcity, and relativity of marginal positions in social groupings).